Tag: Croxteth Park

Plans were once put together to make West Derby a more peaceful village. Only a few clues now remain to those plans.

Martin’s Note: I’m indebted to the West Derby Society again for revealing this feature to me, in a post on their Facebook page back in December 2015.

Having been a political centre for many centuries, the history of West Derby is as a cross-roads for many journeys, and has had the shops, pubs, churches and schools which attract people on a regular basis.

West Derby Village was even once a tram terminus, and remains a busy thoroughfare to this day. And so it seems that, during Liverpool’s progressive and expansive decades – the 1920s and 1930s – the suggestion was made for a ‘by-pass’ (though not the type of multi-lane, multi-mile bypass we envisage these days!) to skirt around the village. It was hoped that this would make it a quieter, less congested place.

The original West Derby Society post which inspired this article

As the West Derby Society post shows, a map was drawn up by the city engineers in 1936, showing the proposed route. The road, marked on this map in red, would have taken Blackmoor Drive right through to Town Row (it currently stops short of Aysgarth Avenue).

From there the road would have created a fork in front of St. Paul’s Church, with Town Row heading one way and the new road heading more directly north. The plan shows the road joining up with South Parkside Drive, and running all the way through to Melwood Drive. It then joins Parkside Drive again on the north side of Croxteth Park before hitting Muirhead Avenue.

Apparently it was the Second World War which put the plans on hold, and they were never completed. Also, the Earl of Sefton was none too pleased about the prospect of having a road going through his park!

The map showing the proposed route (in red) where the never-completed road would have run.Map courtesy of West Derby Society

The landscape clues and remains

What immediately strikes you as you look at the map is the name Parkside Drive. We still have South Parkside Drive and Parkside Drive, so it’s no doubt that the road in its entirety would have been known as Parkside Drive. One of the most satisfying elements of this is that not only does it explain the two disconnected stretches of Parksides, but it also shows that an actual park-side road would have been in existence, earning the name more truly than the current pair, perhaps!

Looking at the near-contemporary Ordnance Survey map of 1937 raises a few interesting points too. Blackmoor Drive is in place by this date, stopping at the point that it does today. There is also a gap between the houses on Aysgarth Avenue which is wider at the spot where the by-pass would have been. Also, an area of Apsley Road is left without buildings. Were these merely accidents of development related to plot ownership, or where they deliberately kept undeveloped in case the road scheme went ahead?

Looking further north, at South Parkside Drive itself, it’s certain that the roads and houses were built with the full Parkside Drive in mind. South Parkside Drive extends up to the boundary of Croxteth Park, even where this prevented the building of two or three more houses. It’s this short stretch, and the Croxteth Park boundary wall, which are shown in the photograph at the top of this page.

So even today, with the bypass plans faded from living memory, there are still clues in the landscape – the street names and the oddly short ‘extra’ length of South Parkside Drive, which show what might have been.

It’s been all over the news lately: Liverpool is one of the first British cities to be rendered in three full dimensions on Google Earth. There was, as a crazy extra, a rumour going around that it was in preparation for a new Google office which was opening in the city.

Having written about Liverpool history for a while now, I’m lucky enough to be copied in to a lot of interesting tid-bits of the city’s past. This happened recently when Croxteth Park’s Twitter account posted several aerial shots from the middle of the last century. I’d like to share them with you here.

The early history of Croxteth Park sees it as part of the large hunting forest of Toxteth from the 12th Century onwards. This meant that it kept its green and rural character right up until the end of the 20th Century.